


Comes the Physical

by Sab



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: 1000-3000 words, Gen, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-30
Updated: 2007-04-30
Packaged: 2017-10-02 08:41:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sab/pseuds/Sab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>With thanks to Liz for everything including the winking.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Comes the Physical

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to Liz for everything including the winking.

“I got zapped by a solar flare,” he brags at her. “Bet you never saw anyone do that before.”

Martha sits on the TARDIS railing and swings her legs. “Didn’t even see you do it,” she says. “Coulda been a strong breeze that knocked you down, by the time I found ya.”

The Doctor lunges for a control lever, pirouetting on one toe and throwing his whole body across the TARDIS console. “Yep,” he agrees, a little breathless. “Felled by a strong wind, that’s me.”

Martha leaps down and slides in beside him. “Gimme that stethoscope,” she says, rooting in his jacket pocket. He squirms, all bony hips under her hand, but she pins him against the console and drags out the stethoscope. “Let’s see how those redundant hearts are doing, all zapped and that.”

The Doctor spins out of her grip and makes a big show of punching TARDIS keys. “My hearts are just fine, thank you,” he says. He doesn’t look at her.

Fascinating as every world and every time he’s taken her to has been, the Doctor still remains the most intriguing mystery to her medical mind, and yet, she hasn’t been able to get him to sit for a physical. More truthfully, she hasn’t asked.

“C’mon,” she says. “Just a listen. Breathe in, breathe out, won’t hurt a bit.”

The Doctor’s silent for a second, and when he looks up he’s got that implacable grin. “What do you say?” he asks. “Distant galaxy someplace, make a real vacation of it? Ooooh, Dariastros Colony!”

He’s circumnavigated the TARDIS core halfway, and they feint a bit as Martha dodges right, then left, trying to find the quickest way to catch him. She hates that he’s so fast, mentally, verbally, _bodily_, and of course loves it too, the bastard. She dives for him but he’s a dance of lever-pulling and button-pushing and he’s always just out of reach. Martha stops, dangles the stethoscope and just stares.

“Fine,” she says. “Then I want to go home.”

He looks at her, all stunned and hurt for barely an instant and then that grin’s back. “Course you do,” he says, re-punching keys. “Want to see your mum, get back to school, yeah, it’s time for you to go.”

Martha snorts. “Don’t be petulant. _I_ wasn’t being petulant.”

“Course you were,” says the Doctor, not looking at her. “You all get like this eventually, can’t take the excitement, it’s more than I should expect a human girl to bear. I’m meant to go it alone, last of the Time Lords and all that. Let’s get you back to London.”

Martha takes a step forward, still holding the stethoscope, and the Doctor, like it’s the most casual thing in the world, leaps away to attend to the far side of the TARDIS. But this time when she catches up to him he just turns, hands on the panel behind him, and stares. She wants to melt in those big brown eyes, to succumb and surrender and finally understand him, but instead she hooks the stethoscope to her ears and holds out the receiver, flush over the left breast of his blue pinstripe suit.

His heart is racing, though he stills it while she’s listening, and by the time she slides over to listen to the right it’s dead silent. He exhales. “Is this what you want?”

Martha holds up a finger, be quiet. Then she unhooks the stethoscope. “It’s a step in the right direction,” she says. “Why do you have two hearts? Do you have two of anything else?”

The Doctor winks, any trace of his previous unease gone. “Wouldn’t you like to know,” he says, and moves to turn away again but she catches him by the shoulder.

“Yeah,” she says, working the buttons of his jacket. “I’d like to know that and a whole mess of other things too.”

He cooperates as she takes his jacket off, but balks before the trousers, so she has to roll up his pant leg to take an adequate reflex test. His leg is slender, hairy and strong in her hands. She makes him stick out his tongue and say “Aaah.” Everything’s normal, and when she’s done he squirms again, and she lets him hop down from the console and put his jacket back on.

“Are you just making yourself seem human because I’m checking you out?” she asks.

The Doctor continues buttoning up his jacket. “Yes I am,” he says. “Does that bother you?”

Martha tosses the stethoscope to the floor. “Course not,” she growls. “Why should I care I’m being lied to. Take us to the Dariastros Colony, I don’t mind one way or the other. I’m going to my room.”

She doesn’t turn around when she goes, not even when the Doctor huffs “_thaaaaat’s_ not petulant” under his breath.

She thinks, what's the point of travelling round with the Doctor if he won't let her ask any questions? Won't let her do what she was trained to do? Martha Jones, who went through twenty years of school to get where she was, didn't plan to leave her career behind just because she was in outer space.

“I’m not good at being touched,” the Doctor is saying, in her doorway.

“You’re a great hugger,” Martha offers, by way of truce. He comes in and sits on the bed beside her.

He scratches his neck. "And, I mean, you won't understand what you're looking at even if you do examine me," he says. "Can't you just think of me as a kind of funny-looking human and we'll leave it at that?"

Bleeding _gorgeous_ human, she doesn’t say. This close to her he threatens to make her lose herself, but she remembers she is a _doctor_, and so she sits there and just listens.

The Doctor, ever so slowly, takes off his coat.

“I’ve never traveled with a doctor before,” he says. “Not your sort, anyhow.”

“Afraid I’ll learn your darkest secrets with my stethoscope?” Martha says.

She is startled short when he says, "yes," because it's exactly what she wants, too. He lays the coat on the bed.

“When we first met, in the hospital,” she says. “You let me hear your second heart.”

He smiles. “Ahh, but you’d seen me before!” he says. "I was testing you, see what you'd do."

"Did I measure up?" she asks, as he unbuttons his trousers and drops to blue striped boxers she's never seen before. She's trembling with desire as he allows her, carefully, to undo his shirt.

She lays him out on her bed and arches the gooseneck lamp so he’s spread under its yellow glow. “Bad lighting,” she comments. He can’t help but to leap to sitting and start fumbling with his sonic screwdriver, and in a moment the light is clear and white and medical-perfect. She lies him down again, and has to push a little on the strong rounds of his shoulders to get him to surrender to her touch.

This time when she listens for his heart there’s no lub-dub at all, but a kind of liquid squishing and a faint, almost, beeping, a sort of supernatural click. She pulls away, startled, and he touches her hand.

“You can stop,” he says.

“I’m not stopping,” she says.

He hands her his sonic screwdriver and shows her how to sync it with the wall television so it operates like a sonogram, and he lies still, his skin turning gooseflesh in the cold, and the sheer humanness of that makes her want to wrap herself around him and keep him warm, and safe. She breathes on the end of the sonic screwdriver, then lays her hand on the firm flesh of his stomach and traces the screwdriver across the taut surface.

She can make out a kidney, or something kidney-like, working as a filter down near the bottom of his abdomen, but everything else in there is a mystery, lumpy organs and tubey protrusions all tangled and glowing on the monitor before her. When he breathes, a rainbow of colors shimmers inside him.

She gasps. “Is that the monitor?”

“That’s me,” he says, and presses his lips together.

She can’t stop staring. “You’re so beautiful,” she says, and there are tears in her eyes.

“Yes,” he says, and for a second she thinks there are tears in his eyes too.

And she realizes what it means that he’s the last of his kind, and when she takes his hand he squeezes back.

“I don’t want to go home,” she says. “Not really.”

“Good,” he says. “I mean, I’m glad you want to stay.”

And then he lets go of her hand, and it’s quiet while he gets dressed again. At first she thinks, she knows that body now, that Time Lord mystery. She’s been under the pinstripes, heard those two hearts beating. And then she laughs out loud, because it’s funny to think she could ever know a thing about him at all.

On the Dariastros Colony she performs emergency surgery on a fish-man called Brellis, and he takes them home for supper, and that night, under two crescent moons, the Doctor and Martha Jones stare out at the universe.

“Does the universe look different, now that you know?” The Doctor asks. Know about him, he means, know that such wonder could exist in the form of a man. A man who loved himself more than she could ever hope to love him.

She thinks a minute. “Not the universe,” she says, finally. “Just you.”


End file.
